Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

There are no windows in the internet cafe's private rooms, and the concept of time becomes extremely blurred here. Only the empty buckets of braised beef noodles piled up on the corner of the table and the sausage wrappers scattered all over the floor silently record the passing of time.

"What the hell was this webpage structure written by?!" Zhang Jian pounded his keyboard, his eyes bloodshot, his hair a mess. "I just finished writing the crawling rules, refreshed the page, and it changed the label of that line of data! Are you kidding me?"

Bai Yuhang, with a half-smoked cigarette between his fingers, stared at the CSS stylesheet on Wan Lianghao's screen without turning his head: "Stop cursing. They're just trying to prevent web crawlers. If it were that easy to scrape, what would happen to the people in Sina's tech department? Use fuzzy matching, don't just focus on the tag name, grab the number before the percentage sign."

"I'll give it a try..." Zhang Jian gritted his teeth and switched back to the code interface, his fingers flying across the keyboard, muttering curses at Sina's programmers.

Wan Lianghao wasn't having an easy time either. To make these three modules stand out without overshadowing the main content, he had already revised the layout more than a dozen times. "Sixth brother, isn't this perpetual calendar too cramped on the right side of the search box? It looks like a little ghost."

"That's right." Bai Yuhang walked over and pointed at the screen. "That's the feeling of surviving in the cracks. Most screens nowadays have a resolution of 800x600, and a few are 1024x768. Every inch of space is precious. Turn down the font size by one size, and don't use pure black. Use dark gray instead; it'll be less tiring to look at."

After instructing the two, Bai Yuhang sat back down at the idle machine. Instead of writing code, he opened the drawing software and began drawing boxes and arrows.

The perpetual calendar and weather forecast he's working on now are just appetizers; the real killer move is yet to come. In the center of the canvas, he drew a huge cylinder labeled "Music_DB," with several lines extending from it: artist index, album categories, and the Top 100 chart.

In 2000, the MP3 download market was still a chaotic blue ocean, riddled with dead links and 404 errors, or filled with yellow "GG" (no good) errors. If a clean, fast, and well-categorized music website could be created, the traffic would be absolutely explosive. Next to the music website, he drew two more complex architecture diagrams—"Chat_Room" and "Mate_Book" (alumni directory).

This is the "nuclear weapon" he prepared for the future.

"Knock knock knock".

The door to the private room was kicked open, and a strong smell of cumin and charcoal rushed in, instantly overpowering the lingering smell of instant noodles in the room.

"Are you alive? I told you I didn't need to knock. I could tell it was this house just by the smell of this rancidity." Liu Jing's loud voice came first, followed by his grinning face.

Jiao Liwei followed behind, carrying two large bags of sizzling barbecue and a dozen ice-cold Harbin beers.

"Oh my god!" Wan Lianghao shoved the keyboard aside and jumped up from his chair. "My dear! I've been eating instant noodles and sausages for several meals in a row, I'm sick of it! If you don't come soon, I'm going to eat the mouse!"

"Eat it while it's hot." Jiao Liwei put the bag on the empty table and started distributing the meat skewers. "Second brother took seventh brother to do that tax registration. They said the clerk had a bad face and the two of them were arguing there, so I didn't call them."

With his mouth full of meat and tendons, Zhang Jian asked indistinctly, "Where's my kidney? I need to replenish it; I've lost over a hundred million brain cells."

"I've saved these for you, no one's going to take them from you." Liu Jing handed over two skewers of golden-brown grilled kidneys, and casually patted Zhang Jian's messy hair. "How's it going, Third Brother? I think your hairstyle is getting closer to baldness. You're really getting more and more like a tech guru."

"Get lost." Zhang Jian rolled his eyes, took a big bite of his kidney, and said, "Once this thing is online, I'm going to sleep for three days and three nights, and no one will wake me up."

Bai Yuhang grabbed a bottle of beer, bit off the cap with his teeth, and took a swig. The icy liquid went down his throat, sending a shiver down his spine. "Soon, it'll be open tonight."

The late-night snack was devoured in a flash, and half an hour later, the eldest and fifth brothers were sent back. The door to the private room closed again, and the sound of keyboards resumed, this time with a touch of lightheartedness from the satisfying meal.

Two o'clock in the afternoon of the second day.

"It's done!"

Zhang Jian slapped his thigh and pointed at the screen.

On the local test page, below the search box, in the previously empty space, there is now a line of exquisite small text.

On the left is the red lunar date: "February 24th, Gengchen Year, auspicious for breaking ground, inauspicious for burial." In the middle is a blue weather icon, a cartoon cloud covering half the sun: "Harbin, sunny turning cloudy, -5℃~3℃." On the right is a constantly jumping arrow, which is the Shanghai Composite Index: "1756.82, +1.2%."

The three modules are as if they were always there, harmonious, practical, and even exuding a sense of refinement rarely seen in that era.

"Great." Bai Yuhang stood behind, arms crossed, a smile finally playing on his lips. "This time it's a sure thing."

"Upload?" Wan Lianghao's hand was already on the FTP software button, looking eager to try it out.

"No rush," Bai Yuhang stopped him. "It's afternoon now, peak traffic time. Although our scripts have been optimized, they're still using someone else's data source. If we upload them now and there's a lag, tens of thousands of users will be cursing. Let's wait until midnight."

Wednesday morning at 5 a.m.

Most of the all-nighters in the internet cafe had already fallen asleep, with only a few energetic ones still playing Legend of Mir.

Bai Yuhang rubbed his sore eyes and typed in the last piece of code. This was an asynchronous loading logic he had deliberately added—allowing the webpage to load the navigation links first, while the three small modules quietly fetched the data in the background and displayed it only after receiving it. This way, even if Sina's server crashed, it wouldn't slow down the opening speed of the Qihang navigation.

"pass."

As the progress bar completed, the new version overwrote the old files.

"That's... all?" Zhang Jian asked, somewhat incredulous. "Shouldn't there be an announcement or something?"

"Why issue an announcement? Useful things don't need instructions." Bai Yuhang stretched, his joints cracking. "Let's go back to the dorm and catch up on some sleep. There will be some news tomorrow morning."

……

Eight o'clock in the morning, Daoli District, Xinyu Internet Cafe.

As soon as Zhang Qi, the bald man, opened the door, several students waiting to go online rushed in.

"Boss, turn on the machine! Hurry, I need to check my scores!" A student wearing glasses hurriedly threw down five dollars.

After receiving the card number, the student skillfully turned on the computer. The Windows 98 blue sky and white clouds flashed by, and the browser automatically popped up.

"Huh?" The student was taken aback.

The familiar navigation page was still there, but he immediately noticed a new line of eye-catching red text below the search box.

"What day of the month is it today... Holy crap, the perpetual calendar?" He glanced at it subconsciously. "February 25th... Oh my god, next week is Qingming Festival? I'd better buy a ticket home right away!"

A companion nearby leaned over and asked, "What are you looking at?"

"Look at this webpage, what happened? It even shows the weather forecast! It's -5 degrees today? I knew it was so cold."

"Really? Let me see... Hey, they even have stocks? My dad watches the stock market on TV all day, can you even see real-time data on this?"

"This Qihang.com website is pretty awesome! When did they add this feature?"

Behind the bar, Zhang Qi was wiping the chairs. Hearing the noise, he peeked out and glanced at his computer screen.

"Hey." Zhang Qi rubbed his bald head, looked at the constantly changing stock index on the screen's navigation page, and chuckled. "This newbie's got some skills. This thing is really convenient; it saves me from having to flip through the newspaper every day to find the date."

A similar scene played out simultaneously in front of more than a thousand computers and tens of thousands of home computer screens in Harbin.

This small page update for Qihang Navigation didn't involve any big publicity or fancy pop-ups, but these three inconspicuous little features are like adding a spoonful of lard to a bowl of soy sauce and white rice, instantly making the originally bland internet browsing experience incredibly fragrant.

In the background data monitoring, the originally flat morning rush hour curve suddenly showed a slight upward trend.

That's not an explosion; it's a signal that user dwell time is constantly increasing.